David Hicks 'disgusted' by 9/11 attacks

David Hicks, the "Aussie Taliban" who spent more than five years in
Guantánamo Bay, has spoken for the first time about the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, saying they disgusted him.

Australian citizen David Hicks, a former inmate at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay military prisonPhoto: REUTERS

By Bonnie Malkin in Sydney

2:04PM BST 30 Aug 2011

Almost 10 years after the al-Qaeda attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, the former kangaroo skinner said watching New York's Twin Towers fall on live television from Pakistan was "horrible".

"I think it was a disgusting act – so many people lost their life on that day," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"The devastation and the people jumping from the building and when they collapsed and, just ... it was horrible."

Despite the horror of the September 11 attacks, shortly later Hicks made the decision to go back to Afghanistan, where he was captured in December 2001 by US troops and sent to Guantánamo Bay.

Hicks, now 36, spent five years and four months in the notorious prison, before pleading guilty to a charge of supporting terrorism in exchange for returning home to serve the remainder of his sentence in Australia.

Since his release in 2007, Hicks has denied firing a single bullet for the Taliban or being involved in terrorist activities. He said his role in the combat against US troops was to guard a tank, and that he had abandoned the Taliban and was heading for Pakistan when he was captured.

In the television interview, he described the time he spent training with militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Maintaining that he did not know that al-Qaeda controlled the organisation he was training with, he said Osama bin Laden had visited the camps and that he seemed like a "kind figure". But in contrast to previous statements, he said he never met bin Laden.

In a separate interview, he repeated claims that he was beaten for up to 10 hours at a time by US guards and that at Guantánamo Bay inmates were tortured and given forced injections.

"Guantánamo Bay was a very horrific place," he told the 7PM Project.

"There was sleep deprivation, there was lights 24 hours there was waterboarding some people were shocked with electricity."

The Australian government recently sued Hicks over royalties earned from his memoirs, which it claimed are proceeds of crime.

However, his ordeal is regarded with sympathy by many in Australia and his book, Guantánamo, My Journey, has sold 30,000 copies.